Classical anyone?

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Gustavo Dudamel, conductor
Yo-Yo Ma, cello
Michael Ward-Bergeman, hyper-accordion
Jamey Haddad, percussion
Keita Ogawa, percussion

Barber - Adagio for Strings
Golijov - Azul for Cello and Orchestra
Brahms - Symphony No. 2

Over the decades, Barber's Adagio has reached far beyond the concert hall. It has been played at countless funerals (including those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prince Rainer of Monaco), it was inevitable background music for various 9/11 memorials, and it has become part of popular culture from its abundant use in television and film. (Director David Lynch insisted on using it for the ending of his 1980 film The Elephant Man, over the objections of the film's composer, and more famously still, Oliver Stone picked it to accompany chilling scenes of battlefield carnage in his 1986 Vietnam war epic Platoon.)

Like Mahler's famous Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony, which Lucchino Visconti popularized in the soundtrack for his 1971 film Death in Venice, Barber's Adagio has taken on a life of its own"one far removed from the composer's original intent. Marked "Molto adagio espressivo cantando" (very slowly, with songlike expressiveness), Barber's Adagio is a single, long melody that moves slowly (usually in stepwise motion), unfolding and building, as it weaves its way through the string orchestra. It reaches a peak and then dissolves. Although this music is now indelibly identified with tragedy and mourning, it was in fact inspired by Barber's reading of a passionate poem by Virgil from the Georgics. In Robert Pinsky's translation, the poem begins

As when far off in the middle of the ocean
A breast-shaped curve of wave begins to whiten
And rise above the surface, then rolling on
Gathers and gathers until it reaches land
Huge as a mountain and crashes among the rocks
With a prodigious roar, and what was deep
Comes churning up from the bottom in mighty swirls
Of sunken sand and living things and water . . . more

I'm more partial to Dvorak's Eighth.

First Movement
Second Movement
Third Movement
Fourth Movement

The Symphony No. 2 in C minor by Gustav Mahler, known as the Resurrection, was written between 1888 and 1894, and first performed in 1895. Apart from the Eighth Symphony, this symphony was Mahler's most popular and successful work during his lifetime. The work lasts around eighty to ninety minutes.

The Symphony No. 2 in C minor by Gustav Mahler, known as the Resurrection, was written between 1888 and 1894, and first performed in 1895. Apart from the Eighth Symphony, this symphony was Mahler's most popular and successful work during his lifetime. The work lasts around eighty to ninety minutes.